Established in 2018, Coastr aims to revolutionise the vehicle rental market with its innovative
technology. We are determined to solve a stagnant industry monopolised by the Big 5,
change transportation trends sustainably and help small businesses make sense of big data.
Coastr’s Digital Vehicle Rental Management Software provides independent car and van
rental businesses through a connected platform to become fully digitised and benefit from
immediate cost savings, higher fleet utilisation and revenue maximisation.
Our offering includes:
1. A web-based, all-in-one software, powered by Telematics and AI to efficiently
manage car rental operations ranging from Booking, Maintenance and Pricing, to
reporting and verifications
2. Equipping customers with technological innovations such as Predictive Maintenance,
Dynamic Pricing, Automated Fleet On-boarding, Immobilisation, Keyless Entry and
Biometric Customer Verification. All of the above features are being brought together
as a fully integrated solution to help our customers prepare for the future of car
rentals while competing with major market players
With Coastr’s cloud-based software, rental businesses are being benefitted in endless ways,
some of which are highlighted below:
• Savings of £ 500/vehicle/year due to increased efficiency
• Automated Fleet Management — 15-20% increase in fleet utilisation
• 25-30% overall increase in new bookings
• Fleet Management with a state-of-the-art intelligent system
• Keyless Entry to eliminate long waiting lines, a leading cause of dissatisfaction among 70%
customers.
Coastr’s mission is to support the growth of independent car and van rental businesses while
developing a connected ecosystem for car rentals. We are here to set the bar high for
tomorrow.
Coastr was founded by our CEO, Biswajit Kundu Roy to address the poor customer experience in the car rental industry. Being a regular car rental user for his business trips and holidays, Biswajit was fed up with the frequent agonising experiences of non-transparent pricing, insurance scams and long queues at the airport. Coastr was founded with the vision of enabling the car rental industry with technology innovation. The team started with just 4 people and bootstrapped to 10 people for large part of 2019 before raising pre-seed capital of £200K and some government grants to launch the MVP into the market.
The initial days were tough as the team continued to explore routes for market entry as the sector is heavily dominated by large players who tend to create big barriers to entry or buy out competition. Through a number of pivots from the original idea, the Coastr team decided to make it our mission to support the independent tier 2 and 3 car rental operators in the market to enable their businesses using state of the art technologies and drive more competition against the larger incumbents using a “democratisation” approach similar to Amazon’s play in retail.
The pivot worked well as 35% of the market is held by the independent operators who must deal with a variety of operational challenges, some of them due to their size and inability to compete. This is also where the FinTech or InsureTech aspects of Coastr comes.
One of the biggest challenges the car rental sector faces is the cost of fleet insurance, which not only reduces their bottom-line profits by 30-40% but also then impacts the end customer experience as the operators try to recover some of their costs through insurance mis-selling. Coastr are in a vantage position to help solve this issue using the data in our platform which can provide key insights into the operational aspects of the car rental business through which they can introduce better controls through capabilities such as immobilisation of vehicles, biometric identification of customers, keyless entry, etc. which in turn then will allow the insurance companies to apply better premium using the concept of pay-as-you go or on-demand fleet insurance.
While we continue to scale up our SaaS platform for car rental operators, we are working with Insurance companies to improve the underwriting and claims experience for car rental operators and customers in parallel.
Biswajit Kundu Roy
CEO
Former Management Consultant at PwC and computer science engineer by background with extensive experience of delivering digital transformation for logistics, retail and financial services companies
Rishabh Makrand
Head of Technology
15 years of experience in technology development and data science and experience of working at start-ups
Lee Anderson
Head of Sales & Partnerships
Former national Sales Director at a large Fleet Management company with strong industry knowledge
Tor Billingmo
Head of Products
12 years of experience in defining SaaS product strategy and design contributing to two successful startup exits in last five year
Natasha Sonawane Berry
Marketing Lead
Over a decade of experience in leading marketing and brand strategies for companies, including British Council
Introduction video
Smart grant award for developing on-demand insurance
